Tag Archives: Words

From the point of view of getting into the final, it seems to be bad to sing about Heaven (Montenegro, Portugal), war (Croatia, Finland), cell phones (Belgium, Portugal), or cold (Latvia, Poland, Romania). On the other hand, it’s good to sing about lights (Germany, Norway, Sweden).

Like this:

Inspired by this book, here is a brief history of science in ten English words:

Alembic (14th century). The word “alembic” comes to us from the Greek word ἄμβιξ (ambix) via the Arabic الأنبيق (al-anbīq). See this Google ngram and this dictionary entry. As with “algebra,” “Alnitak,” and “alizarin,” the Arabic definite article “al” in the name of this forgotten item of laboratory equipment is a reminder of the debt which medieval European science owes to the Islamic world.

Atom (15th century). The word “atom” also comes from Greek. A school of Greek philosophers used “a-tomos” (“un-cuttable”) as the name for hypothetical indivisible units of matter. The word was revived in 1805 by the English chemist John Dalton, giving it the meaning it still has in modern chemistry (though without any knowledge of atomic structure). See this Google ngram and this dictionary entry. A later age was to give us “atom bomb.”

Fossil (1610s). Originally referring to anything dug up from the ground, and coming to us from Latin via French, the word “fossil” gradually transformed itself into the modern meaning as people became more and more interested in digging up fossilized plants and animals. Geological theories about the formation of these fossils then gave us the verb “fossilize.” See this Google ngram and this dictionary entry.

Stamen (1660s). The word “stamen” was adopted from Latin to refer to the (male) pollen-producing organ of a flower. The tip of the stamen is called an “anther” (from Greek via French). See this Google ngram and this dictionary entry. The increasing scientific interest in the internal structure of flowers led to the enormously important taxonomic work of Carl Linnaeus.

Metre (1797). The “metre,” as a new unit of measurement, was proposed by the French Academy of Sciences in 1791, and defined to be 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole (measured via Paris). Today, the metre is defined to be the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second. See this Google ngram and this dictionary entry. The Système International d’Unités has also given us “litre,” “gram,” and many units of measurement named after scientists.

Nova (1877). The adjective “nova” (Latin feminine singular for “new”) has a long history. After being applied as an adjective to new stars, it became a noun in its own right around 1877 (see this Google ngram and this dictionary entry). The word “supernova” followed in 1934.

Laser (1959). The word “laser” was coined in 1957 by Gordon Gould and first used publically in 1959. It was originally an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” by analogy with “maser” (see this Google ngram and this dictionary entry). The first working laser was developed by Theodore Maiman and Irnee D’Haenens in 1960. A few years later, this noun spawned the verb “lase.”

Perhaps as a result of what C. P. Snow called “The Two Cultures,” the past century seems to have seen a movement away from Greek and Latin borrowings. The increasing dominance of English has also seen fewer borrowing from modern languages (like “burette”). And with the development of totally new devices and totally new concepts, invented words like “laser” and “gluon” seem to have become more common.

Away

Bug

The word “bug” (as in “software bug”) means “my stupid mistake,” but suggests that an error somehow crawled (or flew) into my program without me being responsible. Which is sometimes a convenient fantasy.